“Harlem. 2005. Let’s say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death.” Thus begins These Ghosts Are Family, the debut novel of Maisy Card. Published in 2020, These Ghosts Are Family is the intergenerational story of the Paisley Family, one that harbors many secrets, including the faked death of Abel Paisely, which starts the book, and how the family grapples with history, trauma, slavery, White guilt, abandonment, poverty, and the Jamaican diaspora, among many other issues. Mia Alvar of the New York Times Book Review described the book as “a rich, ambitious debut novel, [where the] the ghosts bracingly remind [the reader] that no family history is comprehensive, that some riddles of ancestry and heritage persist beyond this lifetime.” Hannah Giorgis of the Atlantic wrote that the novel “moves across time and space as it deftly weaves the families’ paths . . . a tale of the most monstrous acts: intimate betrayals with unthinkable consequences.” Bookpage, in my favorite single line of any review of this book, said “There is magic in these pages.”

Maisy joins to podcast to discuss releasing her debut novel, the inspirations for her book, the themes present in her book, and her future plans as a writer.

Guest:

Maisy Card—Maisy is an author, librarian, and Newark resident. She was born in Portmore, Jamaica and was raised in Queens. She is also a graduate of Wesleyan University and of Brooklyn College’s MFA in Fiction program. Aside from being an adjunct in writing at Columbia, she was also a librarian at Newark Public Library and is a librarian with Donald Payne Tech. 

Background & Articles:

Maisy Card’s author page: here

These Ghosts Are Family Book Page: here

Bookmarks Collection of Reviews of the Book: here

Quote:

“Underneath the eloquence, the glamour, the scholarly associations, however stirring or seductive, the heat of such language is languishing, or perhaps not beating at all–if the bird is already dead.” Toni Morrison, Lecture for the Nobel Prize in Literature [source: The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations]